Voss

by Patrick White

  How he disliked the thin line of her lips, from which forked words would dart at him on occasion, but which were now taut.

  ‘Laura, can you control her?’ called the frightened Belle.

  ‘Yes,’ breathed Laura Trevelyan, on her calmer, but still trembling, mare.

  She looked towards Palfreyman. As he withdrew through the already considerable crowd, he received the impression of a drowning that he was unable to avert, in a dream through which he was sucked inevitably back.

  Ah, Laura was crying out, bending down through that same dream, extending her hand in its black glove; you are my only friend, and I cannot reach you.

  As it had to be, he left her to it. And she continued to sit sculpturally upon her mastered horse, of which the complicated veins were throbbing with blood and frustration.

  Voss, who was by now walking amongst the crowd, had recovered authority, presence, joviality even, and worldliness. He was looking into the eyes of his patrons and forcing their glances eventually to drop, which did please and impress them, convincing them of the safety of the money they had invested in him. As for the ladies, some shivered. His sleeve brushed them as he passed. In one instance, surprisingly, he kissed the hand of a rich tradesman’s elderly wife, who withdrew her member delightedly, looked round, and giggled, showing the gaps in her side teeth.

  What kind of man is he? wondered the public, who would never know. If he was already more of a statue than a man, they really did not care, for he would satisfy their longing to perch something on a column, in a square or gardens, as a memorial to their own achievement. They did, moreover, prefer to cast him in bronze than to investigate his soul, because all dark things made them uneasy, and even on a morning of historic adventure, in bright, primary colours, the shadow was sewn to the ends of his trousers, where the heels of his boots had frayed them.

  Yet his face was a lesson in open hilarity.

  ‘No, no, no, Mr Kirby,’ he was saying. ‘If I fail, I will write your name and that of your good wife upon a piece of paper and seal it in a bottle and bury it beside me, so that they will be perpetuated in Australian soil.’

  Even death and eternity he translated into a joke at which people might laugh by sunlight.

  The simplicity of it all was making him enjoy himself. The terrible simplicity of people who have not yet been hurt, and whom it is not possible to love, he thought, and explored his laughing lips with his tongue.

  Some of those present were patting him on the back, just to touch him.

  Oh yes, he was enjoying himself.

  Only once did Voss ask: Is all this happening to me, a little boy, clinging to the Heide by the soles of his boots, beneath a rack of cloud and a net of twisted trees?

  At the wharf the sun was shining. It was the lovely, lyrical, spring sun, that had not yet become a gong.

  Mr Bonner had returned from his stroll, and was standing between the German and his own horses. His back was square, his calves imperious. Laura would have been glad to shelter behind her uncle’s back, if it had not also been, on final consideration, pathetic.

  ‘You will take every opportunity of sending back dispatches, of keeping us informed’ – he was issuing orders to his servant, saying the same thing over and over again in many different ways, as was his habit, to increase his own confidence.

  Voss was smiling and nodding, to humour the man who considered himself the master.

  And he patted the Lieutenant on the knee, beside whose horse he was passing, and raised his hat to the young ladies, as it was expected of him. None could have found fault with him on that morning.

  Only that he did not raise his eyes higher than the saddle-flaps, Laura Trevelyan observed. She did not, however, censure this behaviour; she was, in fact, bitterly glad. She was perspiring. Her face must surely be greasy, and her jaw so controlled that she would have assumed the long, stubborn look which frequently displeased her in mirrors. It was her most characteristic expression, she had begun to suspect, after long and fruitless search for a better, without realizing that beauty is something others must surprise.

  As she sat upon her horse, knowledge of her superficiality and ugliness was crushing her.

  Mr Bonner, who had been trying all this time to take the German aside, to talk to him intimately, to possess him in front of all the others, was growing more and more preposterous, as he frowned, and shook the jowls of his heavy face, and made little stamping movements with his heel, which caused his spurs to jingle, and emphasized his opulent calves.

  Finally he did succeed.

  ‘I want you to feel you may depend upon me,’ he said, when he had hedged the German off against a crude wooden barrow on which lay some stone-coloured pumpkins, one of them split open in blaze of orange. ‘Any requests that you care to make, I shall be only too willing to consider. Your family, for instance, you have not mentioned, but they are my responsibility, you know, if, in the event of, if you will only inform me of their whereabouts, write me a letter, you could, when you reach Rhine Towers, with any personal instructions.’

  It was badly expressed, if honestly intended. Mr Bonner was honest, but also demanded submission, which he was not always certain of getting. So he picked at the German’s lapel, hoping to effect a closer relationship by touch, and it transpired that the crowd, at least, was impressed. Little ripples of admiration ran along the faces, as they appreciated the daring of this citizen whose hand was upon the foreign explorer. Mr Bonner’s anxiety subsided. He did now honestly love the man, who at times had appeared hateful to him, and scraggy. The merchant’s eye grew moist over a fresh relationship that he had created by magnanimity and his own hand.

  Voss did not find this relationship distasteful, for he could not believe in it. It was not even ludicrous. It was simply unreal.

  He fingered the seeds of the orange pumpkin, and considered what the merchant had said about his family.

  ‘My family,’ he began, arranging the pointed seeds of the pumpkin. ‘It is long since I corresponded with them. Do you not think that such arrangements of birth are incidental, even if in the beginning we try to persuade ourselves it is otherwise, and are grateful for the warmth, because still weak and bewildered? We have not yet learnt to admit that destiny works independently of the womb.’

  Mr Bonner looked at the clear eyes, and did not understand.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘Does it, though? Does it? Who can say?’

  Not Mr Bonner.

  ‘But I will write, I expect, when it is time. My father is an old man. He is a timber merchant. He is perhaps dead. My mother is a very sentimental woman. Her own mother was Swedish, and the house is full of painted clocks. Na, ja,’ he said, ‘striking at different times.’

  This lack of synchronization alone was threatening to upset him. He smelled the stovy air of old, winter houses, and flesh of human relationships, a dreadful, cloying tyranny, to which he was succumbing.

  Resentment of the past forced him out of himself, and he looked up into the face of that girl whose hands had been tearing the flesh of camellias. For an instant their minds were again wrestling together, and he experienced the melancholy pleasure of rejecting her offered prayers.

  Laura Trevelyan was sitting her horse with a hard pride, it seemed, rather than with that humility which she had desired to achieve.

  She is a cold, hard girl, he decided, and I could almost love her.

  The less discriminate sunlight did.

  Then Laura Trevelyan had to turn her face away from the glare, that was making her eyes glitter, or from the form of the German, that was filling her whole field of vision. I am, after all, too weak to withstand tortures, her eyes seemed to say.

  And he turned away, too, no longer interested.

  Just at that point the crowd parted to admit an open landau that was arriving with every sign of official importance. The liveries would have snubbed the most intrepid radical. Some mouths frankly hung open for the gold, and for the dash of scarlet that blazed and
rocked above the black lacquer.

  It was the Governor himself, some maintained.

  But those who knew better were contemptuous of such ignorance, as if the Governor himself would arrive upon the scene in an unescorted vehicle.

  Those who knew most, who were in touch with the Household, or whose cousin, even, had dined once at the vice-regal table, said that His Excellency was confined with a severe cold, and that this was Colonel Featherstonhaugh come to deputize for him at the leave-taking.

  It was, in fact, the Colonel, together with some young anonymous Lieutenant, of sterling origins and pink skin, that apologized at every pore. The Colonel, however, was a man of self-opinion, of rigidity, and least possible flesh. He waited for the German to be led up and, because it was a duty, would acquit himself, it was suggested, with all dignity. His personal feelings were controlled behind his whiskers, or perhaps not quite; it was possible to tell he was an Englishman.

  His Excellency the Governor wished Mr Voss and the expedition God-speed and a safe return, the Colonel said, with the littlest assistance from his fleshless face, which was of a rich purple where the hair allowed it to appear.

  And he clasped the German’s hand in a gloveful of bones.

  Colonel Featherstonhaugh did say many other things. Indeed, when a space had been cleared, he made a speech, about God, and soil, and flag, and Our Young, Illustrious Queen, as had been prepared for him. The numerous grave and appreciative persons who were surrounding the Colonel lent weight to his appropriate words. There were, for instance, at least three members of the Legislative Council, a Bishop, a Judge, officers in the Army, besides patrons of the expedition, and citizens whose wealth had begun to make them acceptable, in spite of their unfortunate past and persistent clumsiness with knife and fork. Important heads were bared, stiff necks were bent into attitudes that suggested humble attention. It was a brave sight, and suddenly also moving. For all those figures of cloth and linen, of worthy British flesh and blood, and the souls tied to them, temporarily, like tentative balloons, by the precious grace of life, might, of that sudden, have been cardboard or little wooden things, as their importance in the scene receded, and there predominated the great tongue of blue water, the brooding, indigenous trees, and sky clutching at all.

  So that Mr Voss, the German, listening with the others to that talk of soil, flag, and Illustrious Queen, in music of speech at least, for he had taken refuge in his own foreignness as a protection from sense of words, was looking rightly sardonic. He was compelled to shift his gaze from the faces of men, and to cast it out into space. Any other attitude would have been hypocritical, but, on the other hand, no one else present was justified in aspiring to that infinite blue.

  When Colonel Featherstonhaugh’s speech had unwound, right down to the last inch of buckram, and the Queen had been saved, in song and with loyal hats, and the pink, young Lieutenant, whose name was Charlie Tatham, Tom Radclyffe remembered, had become entangled in an important personage with his sword, Mr Voss roused himself, and in his usual, stiff, reluctant manner, presented to His Excellency’s envoy Mr Palfreyman and Frank Le Mesurier, who were at his side, Mr Bonner, and other supporters of the expedition – or rather, some of these last more or less presented themselves, as they were in the habit of dining with, and on several occasions had even got drunk with, the Colonel.

  Then a horse neighed, dropped its fragrant dung, and life was resumed.

  As the spectators were circulating again, making every effort to whirl the leader of the expedition out of one another’s grasp, Mr Bonner realized that he had finally lost control of his plaything, and began to sulk. It seemed to him that nobody had paid sufficient tribute to his initial generosity, without which the present function would not have been taking place.

  ‘Well, Bonner,’ said the Colonel, in whose vicinity he was left standing, and who now saw fit to extend some measure of informal joviality to the Colonials amongst whom his lot was temporarily cast, ‘there is little for ordinary mortals like you and me to do. It is up to the Almighty and the wind.’

  ‘Oh, the wind,’ exclaimed Mr Bonner, looking gloomily at the sky, ‘the wind suits itself when it comes to filling canvas. We shall be kept here mumbling the same words till tomorrow at dark. That is the wind all over.’

  The Colonel, who had no intention of remaining five minutes beyond official necessity, smiled his conception of a jolly smile.

  ‘Then it is up to the Almighty, eh, Bonner?’

  And he summoned his Lieutenant to summon their vehicle, that he might abandon the whole damn rout, and dispatch his dinner. His duty done, his long legs folded up, the door of the landau closed, the Colonel looked about him from under his eyebrows with the superiority of his class and rank. Not even the Almighty would have denied that.

  Then he was driven away, and almost everybody, certainly Mr Bonner, was glad.

  Feeling suddenly released from any further obligation whatsoever, the latter was determined to punish someone, and resolved to do it in this manner.

  ‘Our presence here is superfluous,’ he decided, ‘now that we have paid our respects. So let us take it that we may slip away.’

  ‘Oh, papa!’ Belle cried.

  ‘I will ride round by the store. Palethorpe is an excellent fellow, but will depend to his dying day on someone else’s judgement.’

  ‘But Papa, the ship,’ pleaded Belle, who was again a little girl, ‘we shall not see her sail!’

  Mr Bonner did not say: Damn the ship.

  ‘You, Mr Radclyffe, will escort the ladies home, where Mrs Bonner will have been expecting them this little while.’

  The Lieutenant, who was still in a position where he must appear exemplary, answered:

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then, at least,’ protested Belle, ‘let us shake hands with Mr Voss, who is our friend, whether we like him particularly or not. Papa, surely you agree that this would be only right? Laura?’

  But Laura said:

  ‘If Uncle will shake hands, I feel nothing further will be necessary.’

  ‘How peculiar everybody is,’ Belle remarked.

  She was only just beginning to suspect rooms that she might not enter.

  ‘I wish I was free,’ she paused, and pointed, ‘like that black woman. I would stay and wait for the wind. I would wait all night if need be. And watch the ship out.’

  ‘Does it mean so much to you?’ asked Tom Radclyffe, who was bored by Belle for the first time, and realized that similar occasions would occur.

  ‘Nothing,’ she cried.

  ‘You are exciting yourself, Belle,’ said her father, who did not consider that his daughter or his niece needed to be understood.

  ‘It is not what the ship means to me,’ said Belle.

  It was that she had been made drunk by life, and the mysterious wine that spilled from the souls of those she loved, but whom, perhaps, she would never know.

  ‘I do not care for the ship,’ she persisted, ‘or anyone in her. Do you, Laura?’

  Laura Trevelyan was looking down.

  From this jagged situation the party was saved by Voss himself, who came up and said to Mr Bonner with a spontaneous thoughtfulness which was unexpected:

  ‘I regret that my departure must be causing you so much inconvenience, but I have not learnt yet to influence the wind.’

  Mr Bonner, who had begun to wonder what he could influence, and whether even his daughter was giving him the slip, laughed, and said:

  ‘We were on the point of disappearing. You would not have noticed it in these circumstances.’

  The German squeezed Mr Bonner’s hand, which made the latter sorrier for his situation. The way people treated him.

  ‘I will remember your kindness,’ Voss said.

  He could have become fond of this mediocre man.

  I will not give him the opportunity, Mr Bonner thought, on sensing it.

  ‘If you should find yourself in need of anything,’ he hastened to say, ‘you will infor
m us.’

  His mind snatched at packing-needles.

  Belle was happier now that the departure was taking a more personal shape.

  ‘You may send me a black’s spear,’ she called, and laughed, ‘with blood on it.’

  Her lips were young and red. Her own blood raced. Her thoughts moved in pictures.

  ‘Indeed, I shall remember this,’ the important explorer called back, and laughed too.

  ‘Good-bye, Tom,’ he continued, grasping the Lieutenant, who had bent down from his horse, and offered his hand with rather aggressive manliness to preclude all possible sentiment; one never knew with foreigners.

  ‘Good-bye, old Voss,’ Tom Radclyffe said. ‘We shall plan some suitable debauchery against your return. In five years’ time.’

  He was forced to shout the last words, because his big horse had begun to plunge and strain, as the horses of Tom Radclyffe did, whenever their master took the centre of the stage.

  ‘In five years’ time,’ his strong teeth flashed.

  Foam was flying.

  ‘With a beard over my arm,’ laughed Voss, matching his friend’s animal spirits with a less convincing abandon of his own.

  All this was spoken as he was touching other hands. The fingers of Belle Bonner slid through his. The hands of women, even of the younger ones, he took as a matter of course, but always as an afterthought.

  ‘Tom! Do, please, take care!’ Belle Bonner begged. ‘That horrible horse!’

  One woman screamed, whose cheek was lashed by horsehair – she felt it in her mouth, a coarse, stinging dustiness. Her bonnet had become disarranged.

  While everybody was apologizing, and Voss was smiling and watching, still rather pleased with that scene of horseplay in which he had acted a minor but agreeably unexpected part, he was reaching up and taking Miss Trevelyan’s hand, which the glove made quite impersonal. Fascinated by the movement and colour, the turmoil and laughter, the confusion of the good woman who had bit upon the horse’s nasty tail, he did contrive to shake hands, if only after a fashion.

  As soon as a decent interval had elapsed, Laura withdrew her hand. If Voss did not notice, it was because he was absorbed.